Albert Hennig - Leipzig "Die verschollene Generation - watercolor and ink - beautifully framed - 1962

• Albert Hennig had to struggle with the prevailing political conditions throughout his entire artistic career as a painter, draftsman and photographer. First the National Socialists prevented him from working, then the cultural policy of the GDR put obstacles in his way. Despite this, he developed into one of the last important artists of the Bauhaus school. Difficult circumstances sharpened Hennig's eye for social injustices.

Albert Hennig was born on December 7, 1907 in Leipzig; he came from a working-class family and grew up in humble circumstances with several siblings. The formative experiences of his childhood gave him an awareness of social injustice, which was to have a decisive influence on his later art. Hennig's professional beginnings were logically in craftsmanship, not in art. As a trained concrete worker, he worked in various regions of Germany. Albert Hennig was politically active from an early age: in 1923 he joined the Socialist Workers' Youth, and in 1928 he became a member of the SPD. The most important consequence of his socio-political interest was the purchase of a camera (type Zeiss Ikonta 6x), with which he, as a self-taught photographer, attempted to capture the predominantly precarious conditions of the proletariat of his time. His first photographs served as a successful application to the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1929, where he was one of the last students until 1933. His teachers included, among other famous Bauhaus artists, Josef Albers, who also inspired Hennig to paint, and the great Bauhaus pioneer Paul Klee, to whose work Albert Hennig's works have particularly many references.

Politics as the enemy of art
Albert Hennig's photo series "Children of the Street", commissioned by the social democratic Children's Friends movement, was a sensational success. For Albert Hennig, however, this first triumph also meant the temporary end of his promising artistic career: in 1933, the National Socialists, who were pushing for power, destroyed Hennig's series of pictures exhibited there during their occupation of the SPD office in Leipzig and declared them "degenerate". Albert Hennig was thus deprived of his livelihood as an artist and had to work as a forced construction worker from 1934 to 1945. After the war, there was a brief sigh of relief; Hennig helped to found the "Visual Artists" group and joined the SED. However, his hope for a socially just society in the GDR, which he wanted to help shape through his art, was not fulfilled. The public praise of art historian Will Grohmann did little to conceal the increasingly apparent conflict between Albert Hennig's abstract art and the state-imposed socialist realism of GDR cultural policy. Disappointed, Hennig eventually left the SED and went back to work as a concrete worker.
Albert Hennig retired, but never retired
Albert Hennig was only able to pursue unhindered artistic self-realization again when he retired. From 1972 onwards he created his extensive late works, which earned him his own exhibition in the Chemnitz gallery "Oben" in the same year and attracted international attention after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The strict Bauhaus style conquered the enthusiastic art world one last time. The long-denied applause now erupted in many voices for Albert Hennig, and prestigious awards such as the Max Pechstein Prize in 1991 and the Federal Cross of Merit in 1996 were the result.
When Albert Hennig died on August 14, 1998, he left behind an extensive artistic legacy, historically valuable correspondence and the memory of an artist who belonged to a lost generation but successfully resisted oblivion.
© Kunsthaus Lempertz